Tuesday, 20 February 2018

Technology definitely made our lives so much more vibrant, colorful, and definitely more efficient. We can do so many things all at once now and we don’t even have to travel hundreds to thousands of miles to find work overseas when remote staff are hired regardless of what part of the world they are from as long as they can do the job right and on time. Distance is no longer an issue and aside from virtually erasing boredom from our dictionary, our tech faves have also somehow managed to ease the homesickness felt by individuals working abroad as they can now communicate with their loved ones anytime they want through video calls, where most platforms are often free as long as you have an Internet connection.

Unfortunately, our obsession with technology is not always rainbows and butterflies. There are a lot of awful things that can also go wrong if you aren’t that privy when it comes to using tech gadgets. Cybercriminals are just lurking in the most obscure of places waiting to pounce on unknowing individuals who happen to be in the wrong place and at the wrong time and with a gadget in hand. And since we love to frequent the web the most and make use of platforms where we can interact with other users, we likely have to build profiles like in most SNS or perhaps love the ease and convenience offered by online shopping so we can’t keep track anymore of the places on the web where we have an account with. And since these places deal with big data, they often make use of computer servers. However, that is where the danger lurks.

Mecklenburg County government has been paralyzed by an unknown computer hacker after a county employee unknowingly opened an email attachment Monday that unleashed spyware and a worm into the county’s computer system.

County manager Dena Diorio said Tuesday night that the hacker has essentially frozen the county’s electronic files. The hacker is seeking $23,000 for an encryption key that would release the files.

The hacker’s deadline: 1 p.m. Wednesday.

“The files on the servers are being held for ransom,” she said before a commissioners meeting Wednesday.

Diorio said the county is working with a third-party technology company to decide what to do. She said she is open to paying the ransom, which would be paid in bitcoin.

If you are not careful enough, you can easily fall prey to cybercrimes. Nowadays, malware is the most common way these virtual criminals disrupt the natural world order. Ransomware is the most common. Just this year alone, they were able to cripple nations, governments, and various organizations. Unknowingly opening a suspicious email is usually what it takes for the bug to corrupt your system and render your device useless and your data lost forever. It is even more costly when big servers are targeted because the extent of the damage can be extensive. While these facilities where computer servers are housed are often safe and secure, breaches can happen and even Amazon was a victim of that just this year.

A US-based man has pleaded guilty to creating a giant botnet that was used to disrupt access to much of the web in October 2016.

The Mirai malware also caused havoc later last year when it was used to stop people's internet routers working.

Paras Jha has admitted working with others to infect more than 300,000 devices and using them to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and other criminal activity.

There are many ways for criminals to hack any system and leave everyone lost and in a panic. Imagine a widespread ransomware attack on big servers of famous sites can ever leave that specific down for an unspecified period of time, data in their server compromised, and even the remote gadgets connecting to them at that time infected as well. The damage is twice as hard, painful, and costly for people and organizations that lost their devices due to encryption, for instance, and no longer has access to pertinent files that are crucial to their business’ operation. For ransomware, they prefer payment in bitcoins because they no longer need to go to banks to get their hands on the money. Indeed, modern innovations can be modern pains as well.

Well, since these things happen no matter how much security measures big servers use in order to protect itself from cyber hackers, why not learn more about data recovery on these devices so you have an idea whether or not you can still get your data back after such a massive and widespread attack. These articles https://www.harddriverecovery.org/clean_room.html and https://www.harddriverecovery.org/server-recovery/ may be helpful to enlighten everyone about the process regarding recovering your data in light of such an unfortunate incident that is now becoming more common in today’s modern world.